Cellist v. CEO

The Cellist wakes to sunlight over the mountains to the far east.

Rising, she realizes that one of the two pistols is missing. She pads her person, looks under the table, looks around the base of the oak, jumps and catches a quick look inside the hole in the oak. Nothing. Gone.

Then she remembers the previous night: an argument from inside the shack. Shouting, yelling, the sound of a door slam shut. She fell asleep soon after, back to the oak, one pistol in hand a and the other tucked in her coat pocket. But when? And how could she have slept through the theft?

She breaks and trembles. Thinking, irrationally fearing that the caretakers are somewhere nearby, now armed. A profound, unreasonably vulnerability sweeps across her. Then, moments later, guilt, as if some mortal duty had been neglected. Without both pistols there stood a terrifying variable—and there she cowered, the cause of that variable.

Just then—the splinter of gunfire. One shot.

Soon after: wailing.

From the shack to the north.

She gently cracks the top catch of the revolver, checks the rounds, locks the catch, and crouches against the oak.

Pepple emerges soon after, pistol in hand, drained. The wailing continues from within. Pepple walks across the newly turned field. He walks past the posts that formed the fence, and past the mass grave. He walks across the field, and—just feet from the oak—he meets the Cellist, pistol out and hammer back, aimed at Pepple’s chest.

Pepple looks at her with slate blue eyes. He blinks. With gentle motion, he tosses the pistol on the grass between them. Then turns and walks back to the shack.

She watches as he nears the shack and watches as a haggard woman emerges, crying, beating Pepple’s chest. Pepple pulls her off him by her hair, and she falls to the earth. Pepple enters the shack. The woman lies motionless.

The CEO arrives in high spirits.

There’s nothing like the innocence of nature to align the moral compass, he says with ebullience, stretching his arms wide, taking in the spring air.

The Cellist doesn’t move from her crouch.

Said by Emerson, I believe—Emerson or Thoreau. Emerson or Thoreau or Whitman. Or Frost. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost or Charles Kuralt, I forget.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.